Senate Report Accuses Company of Manipulating Researchers' Studies

Submitted by Doug Lederman on October 26, 2012 - 4:25am

A U.S. Senate report[1] Thursday accused the pharmaceutical company Medtronic of heavily editing and even writing sections of journal articles published by academic researchers on its consulting payroll, without those ties or the company's involvement being reported. The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana's Max Baucus and Charles Grassley of Iowa, said their 16-month investigation had found significant evidence of undisclosed ghostwriting of positive articles about the company's product known as InFuse. Medtronic disputed some of the report's findings in a statement[2], and an article in The Wall Street Journal[3] included rebuttals from some of the academic researchers.